In this dissertation, I examine the strategic initiatives that the Danish TV channel DR3 has taken to attract its target audience (age 15-39), the role that digitisation and idea development play in the channel’s TV production and the understanding of creativity that the channel’s employees use. The motivation behind the dissertation is that young Danes are increasingly abandoning flow television viewing in favour of streaming, which is a problem for the broadness of DR’s public-service mandate and so the digitisation of the television medium calls for new solutions and new competencies in the TV industry. Due to this, DR3’s solution has been to try to appeal to the target audience by experimenting with programmes and content for digital platforms.

In this regard, I have been interested in what DR3’s channel strategy actually is and to what extent this strategy creates a creative pressure that affects the channel’s programming production and idea development. In order to examine this empirically in the period 2016-2019, I have carried out a number of qualitative research interviews with editors and freelancers at DR3 and DR Ung, done ethnographic observations of DR3/DR Ung’s idea development processes and conducted a quantitative content analysis of DR3’s range of programmes from 2013-2017.

Theoretically, the dissertation draws on research within TV production and creativity respectively and it suggests how these two theoretical areas can be combined, how studies of creativity in TV production can be conceptualised and operationalised through concrete analyses and how a focus on creativity requires a number of methodological considerations. Due to a lack of theories
about creativity in TV, I have included understandings of creativity from other theoretical fields and especially the social constructivist approach to creativity as a phenomenon as well a number of theories about idea development and gatekeepers have proven to be useful analytical tools.

Because of the dissertation’s article-based format, it is based on four articles and their production analyses about DR3’s channel strategy, the production of the DR3 series Anton 90, the approach to youth fiction at DR3 and DR Ung as well as the use of different evaluative regimes in their idea development processes. The analyses show how DR3 has evolved and changed its channel
strategy since its launch in 2013 but also the continuity in the channel’s production of programming, and how the channel continuously has delivered new programming concepts within specific genres and attempted to create unique public-service content for the target audience.

In total, the dissertation contributes by clarifying how the creative value of TV programmes is an unstable phenomenon and how creativity in TV production is a complex interplay between different social mechanisms where gatekeeping editors at DR3 and DR Ung play an important role in the evaluation of which products and ideas are “creative”. In the case of DR3, their intention to experiment puts a creative pressure on the developers because they are used to navigating after the gatekeeping editors’ preferences, which are suddenly bypassed when the editors ask for experimental ideas. Consequently, the conclusion points to how the creative pressure can be the result of a tension or antithesis between branding (consistency) and creativity (novelty), between which the channel needs to prioritise. As a result, the dissertation can conclude that a creative pressure is present in the idea development, which is characterised by the channel’s intention to experiment, by a simplicity regime in the development process, by a low success rate for new ideas as well as by changed market conditions as a consequence of digital process of change within the television medium. Accordingly, my dissertation challenges certain notions about autonomy in media industries and accentuates how creativity cannot merely be described as a positive and mysterious power of creation, but that can also function as a pressure in production processes and how these results call for further empirical studies of idea development and creativity in TV production.